


Spider-Woman: The Dress That Needed Some Polite Chitchatting

by wjjmwmsn5



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Gen, Iron Dad is the best dad, Peter's name is Pearl in this bc she's a trans girl, Trans Girl Peter Parker, Trans Peter Parker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 05:32:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11753082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wjjmwmsn5/pseuds/wjjmwmsn5
Summary: The one where Spidey absolutely kicks nothing's ass, but she does in fact have a good conversation with not only a dress and a mirror, but also Iron Dad Tony Stark himself, and does some great gender questioning while she's at it.





	Spider-Woman: The Dress That Needed Some Polite Chitchatting

**Author's Note:**

> Requested by destaribka on tumblr. My url is transpeterparkers.  
> This was a load of fun to write so I hope everyone enjoys!! Let me know what you think

**** Pearl sat staring at the dress in her suitcase for a long time that night. She had taken it from May and stuffed it in there along with all the rest of the clothes that she was packing for the trip to the Avengers Headquarters. She didn’t know why she did it. Thinking back on it, it had been a stupid idea. 

But it just felt less like anyone would burst in on her while she was at the Avengers Headquarters. It felt like the only time to do this in peace. 

Tony had been a really good mentor to her since he found her to be Spider-Man. Somewhere along the way, she knew that she had started to see him as a father figure in her life, but she didn’t want to say that aloud. That was too embarrassing. But it was only reinforced when he asked her if she wanted to come to the Avengers Headquarters for the weekend—to check up on the suit and see how things were for the big dogs, he said. But she felt like it was also a way to get closer to her. 

Happy had driven her upstate once she was all packed after school, and she wanted badly to be focused during the dinner she had with them and a couple of the others at the headquarters. How cool was it that she was having dinner with, like, half of the Avengers? How cool was it that Tony Stark was just sitting there, talking to her about the science of her superhero suit? Pretty fucking cool. But she was only half-there the whole time, the rest of her mind hidden with that dress. 

Of course no one would peek in her suitcase. That would be completely invasive. But it worried her anyway. 

She thought she would be relaxed when she was back in her room and alone with the suitcase, but she wasn’t. Every time she tried to do something, like get on her phone and text Ned or MJ, or text goodnight to Aunt May, she just saw the suitcase staring at her out of the corner of her eye.

So finally, she got up the courage to walk over and open the bag. 

There it was, and there she was, staring at it. At one point, May texted her goodnight first, so she texted back, but the whole time she kept an eye on the dress like it was going to suddenly stand up and announce its presence to the whole Avengers headquarters. 

She had gone to her room earlier than she was sure Tony had planned for her, so it was only nine. She felt really bad about denying a movie night, especially because he didn’t seem to buy how tired she claimed she was. 

She felt really bad about the whole thing. She shouldn’t have brought the dress.

Besides, why would she want to wear it? She wasn’t a girl. She knew that. She knew that she was a boy. She was Peter. She was Spider-Man.

Except the amount of times that she had sent the name “Pearl” to some of those name affirmation blogs said something else. 

So she was maybe a girl. 

Maybe it would be easier for her if everyone didn’t already know her as Spider- _ Man. _ Maybe it would be easier if her middle name wasn’t Benjamin, and she didn’t feel like she was leaving behind a final piece of him if she changed her name. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but no maybes were as good as a  _ definitely.  _

She had thought that maybe the definitely could be found in trying on the dress, but she was so scared of what she would find in that mirror. 

She let out a breath and summoned the courage it took to come over to the suitcase in the first place. She was Spider-Man. Or maybe Spider-Woman. She was Spider-Woman, and damn it, if she could kick the Vulture’s ass, she could sure as hell kick this dress’s ass too.

Or she could just put it on and enjoy it. She didn’t think the dress needed its ass kicked. It was a very nice dress, even though May never wore it—which was the whole reason she had brought it along. 

She tried to think of nice things she did as Spider-Woman to compare with instead of kicking its ass. She could have a polite conversation about frozen custard with the dress while she waited for the police to come. She could give it directions while it wore old tennis shoes and a tourist-y t-shirt. She could certainly do a flip for it while it recorded her and put it on YouTube. Yes, that’s what she would do to the dress. Its ass could remain very much un-kicked. 

So now she was definitely just procrastinating putting it on. 

“Okay, dress, prepare to be politely chitchatted with,” she said to it, slipping off the t-shirt and shorts she had put on to sleep in. She took the dress out of the suitcase and stared at it for a long moment. And then she pulled it over her head and let it fall down over her. 

For a moment she was frozen, and then she realized how much she liked how it felt to wear it. And because she had always wanted to, she swished around in the dress so the bottom flowed out. 

“Cool,” she mumbled. 

Time to look in the mirror. Maybe.

“Okay, okay, okay, Parker. You got this! You’re Spider-Woman! Politely chitchat  _ the hell  _ out of this mirror!” she whispered as she walked over to the mirror in the room Tony had given her to sleep in. 

Wow. Okay. She really liked this dress. 

She had started growing her hair out a little bit recently—not too long, but long enough. She positioned it how she wanted, not swept back like she usually kept it in front of everyone else. She liked that too. 

“Ah, good. I hope both of you, dress and mirror, feel properly politely chitchatted with,” she said. She looked up into her own eyes for a moment. She felt good. For this sliver of a moment, she felt really good. “Hello, Spider-Woman. What a lovely dress. Where’d you get it? Oh, you stole it, you say. Well, that’s not very Spider-Woman…ly. Maybe, though, it’s Pearl…ly. There’s gotta be a better way to say that.”

It felt good to call herself Spider-Woman. It felt even better to call herself Pearl. 

She heard footsteps outside the door and her eyes widened, but she was frozen to her spot. There were more rooms further down. Someone was just passing through the hallway. 

_ Knock-knock. _

Shit, shit, shit. She still didn’t know what to do.

The door opened. 

She scrambled to move away from the mirror, but she didn’t know where to go, so she ended up just leaning against the wall next to the mirror, her best “casual” pose in place. 

It would have been okay if it was someone like Vision, who would probably just be confused and decide it was weird human stuff he couldn’t understand. But no, it was Tony. 

Of course it was Tony.

“Ah, hey, Tony, what are you, uh— what are you doing here?” she asked, scratching her head. She instinctively swept her hair back when she felt it out of place. 

He looked more confused than Pearl had ever seen him before. And he seemed to get pretty baffled at some “teenager stuff.” 

“Uh, hey… what are you doing?” he asked. 

“Oh, me? I’m just leaning against this wall here.” She looked back at the wall and patted it. “Nice walls you have. Very… sturdy.”

“Right.” Tony frowned at her. “And the dress…?” 

She had some sort of line forming in her head, some dismissive  _ What, a guy can’t wear a dress around?  _ but even thinking of it was upsetting. She didn’t want to say that.

“Oh, this? Well, you know. Uh.” She had no fucking clue what to say. She  _ wanted  _ to tell someone, the more that she thought about Spider-Woman and Pearl Parker and  _ she _ s and  _ her _ s when referring to herself, but she figured the first person she would tell would be May. And not in this circumstances. The pause was growing long. She blurted out the first words that came to her head. “Girl clothes.”

“Yep, that’s— you’re wearing a dress, so—” Tony was cutting himself off more times than the increasing number of heartbeats per minute Pearl’s heart was skyrocketing to. Her face was as red as the Spidey suit, and she didn’t even have to look back in the mirror to tell. “Sorry, I’m really confused. Am I missing something? You’re going to have to spell this out for me.”

“Sure, uh.” She was still floundering. “D-R-E—”

“Normally your smartass comments are, admittedly, a little endearing, but right now I feel like you’re just asking me to get out,” Tony said. “Which I can do, if you want.” 

He seemed sincere, really. She did appreciate how much he respected her privacy. But right then, she really just wanted him to yank the truth out of her so she didn’t have to say it, but so that he would know. 

“No, I just—” Why was it so hard to say? Well, she knew why, really, but she wished that it weren’t. “I was just— Okay, I took this dress from Aunt May, and I wanted to try it on here because I thought it was less likely that anyone burst in on me here than at home, because I’ve been thinking— well, I’ve been wondering— I’ve sort of been questioning… uh… everything?” 

“Everything,” Tony repeated, nodding his head a little bit. “Do you want to elaborate?”

“Well, okay, you know how my name’s Peter? I mean, of course you know my name. It would be a little weird if you asked me to come over to your highly-protected headquarters for the weekend with all the rest of the superhero buddies that aren’t, like, war criminals if you didn’t know my name.” 

She hadn’t meant to say any of that except the first bit, but all of that sort of got away from her. 

“I think I might have a bit of an idea about your name being Peter,” Tony agreed, though he seemed very certain. Definitely not because of using her deadname, though, because he didn’t know it was her deadname yet, and anyway he was in this confusing situation with her, so she was sure that it was just because whatever Pearl was letting come out of her mouth was hardly any language yet invented, let alone what she was actually trying to articulate. 

“Well, you wanna know something really interesting and totally unexpected?” she said. 

“I think I might.”

“Okay, cool fact, then: I think my name’s actually Pearl and I’m a girl and also Spider-Woman so I tried on this dress and I totally politely chitchatted the fuck out of it and the mirror too—and I’m talking, like, if polite chitchatting were the mirror and the dress’s kryptonite, you can bet they’d both be dead by now. Well, metaphorically dead, because I didn’t mean to be violent, which was the whole reason I kicked absolutely nothing’s ass—”

“Slow down, slow down,” Tony said, shaking his head and holding his hand up to him. He shut the door behind him and took a step closer to Pearl. “Say that whole first sentence again.”

“I think it was one sentence.”

“Say the first part.”

“The part about me being a girl named Pearl a.k.a. Spider-Woman?” 

“That’s the one.” Tony pointed to her as if he was pointing to that being the right first part. “Does, uh— Well, no, May wouldn’t know, you said you took the dress from her.”

“No one knows,” she said. She realized how hard her hands were shaking and suddenly it was a lot harder to think of anything remotely smartass to say. She was terrified. 

“And you said you want to be called Pearl?” Tony asked hesitantly.

She nodded. Everything felt a little muted suddenly. She was so scared of Tony being against this. 

“I can do that,” he said. He paused for a moment. “Hey, you look really pale, kiddo.”

She didn’t know when he face stopped being so hot, but now she felt how the blood had drained from her face and her hands had clasped to avoid shaking so hard. 

“It’s okay.” Tony stepped forward again, still hesitantly, and when Pearl didn’t protest, he came and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, Pearl, this is nothing, okay?” 

Hearing her name aloud from someone who wasn’t her felt really good. But she didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded. 

“This doesn’t change how I see you. This won’t change how any of us see you.” He seemed uncertain of his words, like he wanted badly to say what was right. It meant a lot to hear that. All of this… meant so much. She didn’t know how to put it into words, not even in her thoughts. “It’s not going to change how May sees you, either.”

“You really don’t care?” she asked. 

Tony shook his head. “It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a girl or a boy or what. You’re a good kid. That’s what I think is pretty cool.” 

She nodded a little bit. 

“Do you want to tell everybody else?” he asked. 

“In the morning,” she told him. She looked up at Tony. For as bad at dealing with teenagers as he acted like he was, when she needed to it, he always had an arm to put around her shoulders and the right words to say. Well, not always the right words, but always good words with the right intentions. “Thanks, Tony.”

“Hey, no problem.” He patted her back but seemed to waver for a second. Then he put his arm further around her to tug her into a hug. She hugged him back and smiled. Yeah, Tony was a really good dad. When they pulled away, he said, “Well, I just came in here to ask if you wanted some ice cream or something.”

She was glad that he didn’t push her to talk more. She didn’t know what she would say. But ice cream sounded great, so she nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be out there in a second.”

“I’ll have a bowl waiting, kiddo,” he said. He smiled back at her and left the room, shutting the door behind him. 

She really wasn’t thinking when she didn’t lock the door before trying on the dress, but with how well that went—if one could call the beginning half well—she was kind of happy that she hadn’t. 

But anyway. She had some ice cream to go give directions to, or maybe even do a flip for.


End file.
